PhoneAbility

9. Broadband for the home and business user

Pete Gardiner - Spinal Injuries Association

The offices where we worked up to six months ago did not have broadband. We just had a dial-up connection for Internet use. I had broadband at home. I could go home and do research. I was so frustrated with speed, hence using broadband, I found it much better to work with.

I work in a fund-raising team. Part of that has been organising national road shows talking about accommodation for people with disabilities. I do not trust hotels. It is really good if you are on the phone at home talking to the hotel, but if the hotel has a virtual terminal you can look round it and ask questions that are relevant. To me, freeing up my home phone while I was doing this and having broadband was the best thing I could have found to do business with. I just do not trust hotels, but that works out very well.

You can also have another window open, so that if you cannot find a hotel close by and you might have to travel, at least you can get Multimap up to find out the distance. Dial-up was just too slow, too complicated, and took too long. The main advantage is the speed every single time.

Working at home you can e-mail documents backwards and forwards. These can be bigger documents if pictures are involved, and you are writing a report and sending pictures. You are not copying pictures on to CD and posting it, it saves loads of time.

With the opportunities of working from home, this becomes quite relevant for someone with some disabilities. For someone with a spinal injury, getting up in the morning can take a bit of time, by the time you have had a bath, et cetera. If you are not feeling very well, normally it would take quite a long time. You might feel it is not worth traveling an hour to work. At least with broadband, with the speed, you can work at home far easier.

There can also be an element of being unwell, where you could do a couple of hours work per day. If you have to travel to work, you are not going to do it. If you can do two hours and send your work in to the office, some of the problem solved. This would be great for employers because they are not necessarily going to find a temp to employ while you are off, therefore you may feel guilty about being off sick.

Advantages. With broadband, it is the speed and the file sizes that you can send. This is what I have learned that has been very good. People with disabilities do not always keep in touch with people face to face through getting out. When I had my old dial-up connection at home, what a pain! You could be in a chatroom talking to someone and it would drop offline. You reconnect, and two hours later the same thing happens. This does not happen with broadband. The only drawback is the cost and the limit of the size of files that you can download.

Someone with a high spinal injury may not have the full use of their hand functions, so it is going to be easier if they have voice recognition software. They can send an e-mail. You have lost the personal touch, but at least you do not have to type it out. If you want to dial up, you can go off line and use a mike. If you have a spinal injury, going to the Post Office to post a letter could be an issue. To be able to use fast access works better.

Also, very appropriately, if someone is recently injured, they or a family member might want to research their disability. You may go to a specific website. The Spinal Injuries Association do have a relevant chatroom which will cover all topics. People might phone up to talk about holidays. They might talk about research. We have this chatroom hosted and they can be pointed in the right direction.

It could be the person just wants to sit there and see what is going on, in the background: "I am not really sure. Let`s see what people are saying." What you do not want halfway through is to drop offline, have to dial up again and you might have missed something very relevant. You might want to ask questions in the chatroom to others with a disability. If there are professionals there, you might have questions that you would not want to ask someone face to face, or you might be embarrassed about.

Some people with disabilities do not get out. We have shown that about 70% of our members are online. This was a survey done with BT. We do not say this, but to a lot of people it is their lifeline. They shop online and meet people online. You may feel embarrassed by being in a wheelchair. Someone was saying earlier that, with a chatroom, it does not matter if you are black, white, pink, purple, whatever; no-one can see you and you can have a conversation where you feel comfortable. If you are out in the street, people will see and veer straight off. It should not be an issue, but it is in society.

Holidays. It is far easier to book holidays online these days. You can look for hotels and book your flights. You are not going to a tour operator and then having to go back three or four times about access. I will e-mail half a dozen hotels in a certain area to find out if they have accessible rooms and if there is a website to look at. You can find out local attractions and what is going on. You can even go on to a messaging service to try and meet people from that area and ask what facilities there are.

It becomes a very good research tool and the speed is important. I am a very impatient person and I want things there and then. I do not want to keep waiting and waiting for pages to come up really slowly.

Some of the disadvantages. Obviously the cost. How can we remedy it? If we, say, give free Internet access to people, will that get abused? You are going to go down the whole line of what society can and cannot afford, which is not for me to comment on, but cost is the main disadvantage for people. I hear a lot of people say they cannot afford it because they are on benefits. There is so much more to pay for costwise.

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